Life Isn't What You Expect - Part 3

"Are We Totally Crazy or Could This Actually Work?"

 

In 2017, with the children all finished with school and university, I went to work for a company full time - actually the same company as Michael worked for. We continued with myFoodDays as an after school project and we made changes to the system as time allowed. We’d always wondered what things would be like if we were to spend all our time on myFoodDays, but we didn’t think it was financially viable so continued working.

However, things were about to change. During the pandemic we’d both taken on extra work at the company we worked for as they had, had to reduce staff, and with things being the way they were throughout the pandemic, we’d just worked and worked - what else was there to do? But by early 2022 we were both feeling exhausted from working long hours with no real break for over two years, well, actually, more like six years as our job was pretty demanding.

In some resects thank goodness we both had jobs as the pandemic bought school closures meaning no one was ordering lunch, so myFoodDays went rather quiet, in fact with the cost of running the system, and banking fees, we burned through our war-chest however, thankfully, once schools began to open up again this year, they started ordering lunches and myFoodDays began to pick back up.

We started to think, could we make myFoodDays a go, could we really turn it into a proper company that could pay us? We spent so much time going back and forth and struggling to make a decision. We both had good jobs that provided a regular income, were we crazy to give that up and go it alone? Well, only one way to find out… We decided to quit our jobs and take the chance.

So in August 2022 we went full time with myFoodDays. It still wasn’t actually going to pay much, but it was one of those now or never times. We went with the now!

Prior to this we had met with a friend who use to run a restaurant for some advice as we were also thinking about offering a full service where we did everything, from organising the vendors, the menus, operating the system for the schools, and the delivery of the food, leaving them with just the handing out of the lunches to the children.

We sent out an email to current schools to see what the interest was and at the same time two women from one of our myFoodDays schools reached out to say they were thinking of doing the exact same thing and would we like to join and work together? It seemed to be a good idea, perfect timing and so we joined forces!

Now myFooddays has become FoodDays and we’ve added a new arm to the business called FoodDays+. FoodDays+ is the fully managed service where we take care of everything, from organising vendors to creating the menus with the vendors and schools to taking care of all reporting and finances. All the schools have to do is receive and hand out the food. And the best part of all, is this can still be a great fundraiser for your school whether you are using FoodDays or FoodDays+.

It’s November 2022 and we have 10 schools on FoodDays+ as well as lots of other schools using the regular FoodDays system - so things are moving along.

It is still early days but every day Michael and I look at each other and agree this was definitely the right thing to do. We love working for ourselves. Who knows what the future holds but we are going forwards together and taking each day as it comes, being grateful for the here and now.

Thanks for reading my story, if you have any questions or would like to know more, please let me know in the comments below.  I’d love to hear from you.